This is a blog detailing the creation/evolution/ID controversy and assorted palaeontological news. I will post news here with running commentary.

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Simon Barnes Goes on a Tear

Simon Barnes of the TimesOnline is peeved at both the fundamentalists and at Richard Dawkins. In a post titled Caw, is that black thing a bird or a pterodactyl? he laments that the use of science by both sides is causing more problems than solutions:

He [Dawkins] says that evolution is a fact. Fine. He also holds up the non-existence of God as a fact, but that can never be the case. If you believe in an ineffable God who started the whole business of evolution, that’s your business. It can’t be proved or disproved — and therefore, it’s beyond the scientist’s scope. You can’t prove you have a soul; you can’t disprove it either. You can believe that life continues after death, and all that anyone can say is good old you, I wish I did.

Dawkins is right to point out that biblical literalism is wrong. Religion has no more business interfering with fact than science has in messing about with belief. It is not religion’s place to tell us that God created light and then a couple of days later He created the Sun as an after-thought, and if you don’t believe that you will go to Hell.

And it is not the place of science to tell us that Christ did not die for our sins. Science deals in fact; religion deals with belief and faith. Throughout history, when science has revealed facts that contradict religious belief, belief has shifted its ground. These days, nothing remains but faith — but faith is unshakable, at least by science.

You are correct about Dawkins' argument, which is more complex than most people give him credit for. As for the second quote, how is that solipsism? Science can only hypothesize on the observable. Whether or not there is something beyond what we see is not a question open to science. To hypothesize that what we see is all that exists is both reductionist and untestable. Maybe it is true and maybe it isn't but that is where faith comes in.

As for the second quote, how is that solipsism? Science can only hypothesize on the observable. Whether or not there is something beyond what we see is not a question open to science.

In fact, science hypothesizes about, and tests hypotheses about, unobservable stuff all the time. Neutrinos? Purely hypothetical entities unobservable for decades. Never been directly observed and never will be. Genes? Purely hypothetical unobservable entities for decades, and even now are fuzzy.

And why is it solipsism? If knowledge claims rest on faith that is unshakable, then there is no way to resolve conflicts between faith-based claims. Everyone's faith-based claim is equivalent to everyone else's. Any idiosyncratic faith-based claim is as valid as any other. Everyone creates their own faith-based world, with no principled way of reconciling them. That seems pretty solipsistic to me.

The key difference between scientific claims and faith-claims is that for the former we have a shared methodology for testing and justifying them. For the latter there is only a list of the bare claims, bereft of any reliable and shared way to judge which are true and which are false. All faith-claims have exactly the same truth value.

For scientific claims we can assign relative truth values. In a real and useful sense the claim that the earth is flat is less true than the claim that it is a perfect sphere. The latter is false, but not as false as the former. We can use methods -- e.g., Bayseian methods -- to systematically adjust our judgement of the relative truth of claims in the light of new evidence. For faith-claims there is no comparable gradation: all are equally true (or false), regardless of whether they conflict with one another!